Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,27

passed; then years.

One early spring night in 2008 two neighborhood boys on Thirty-Second Street shot at each other. Bullets zipped through the Hinkstons’ front door, shattering its window. Natasha, who was seventeen at the time, was sweeping up the glass when the police arrived. They asked to take a look inside. To hear the Hinkstons tell it, the officers ransacked their house, looking for guns or drugs. (Patrice speculated that a neighbor associated with one of the shooters had pinned the crime on the three young men who were staying with the Hinkstons at the time: Patrice’s and Natasha’s boyfriends as well as a cousin.) All the police found was a mess: dishes piled high in the sink, overflowing trash cans, flies. The Hinkstons were not the tidiest family, and to make matters worse, they had thrown a party the night before. There were less superficial problems too, like the plywood board the landlord had haphazardly nailed over a sagging bathroom ceiling. Perhaps because of the mess, or because Patrice began snapping at the officers around two a.m., or because they believed the Hinkstons had played a role in the shooting—whatever the case, the police called Child Protective Services, who called the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS), who dispatched a building inspector, who issued orders to the landlord, who filled out a five-day eviction notice, citing unpaid rent. Doreen had only managed to get halfway caught up when the shooting happened. There had never been a need to rush.

After the court commissioner stamped their eviction judgment, the Hinkstons needed to find another place quickly. They searched on their own—but without a car or the Internet their reach was limited. They sought help from social workers, and one put them in touch with Sherrena. She showed them the apartment off Wright Street, and they hated it. “I wouldn’t advertise it to a blind person,” Patrice said. But anyplace, the family figured, was better than the street or a shelter; so they took it. Sherrena handed Doreen the keys on the spot, along with a rent receipt dashed off on a scrap of paper. Doreen tucked the scrap with PAID $1,100, RENT + SECURITY DEPOSIT into her Bible.

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Poor families were often compelled to accept substandard housing in the harried aftermath of eviction. Milwaukee renters whose previous move was involuntary were almost 25 percent more likely to experience long-term housing problems than other low-income renters.1 Doreen said she took Sherrena’s apartment because her family was desperate. “But we not gonna be here long.” Eviction had a way of causing not one move but two: a forced move into degrading and sometimes dangerous housing and an intentional move out of it.2 But the second move could be a while coming.

The Hinkstons began looking for new housing soon after moving into Sherrena’s place, calling the numbers on rent signs and leafing through apartment listings in the RedBook, a free glossy found at most inner-city corner stores. But their previous move had left them exhausted, and Doreen’s fresh eviction record wasn’t helping matters. Patrice soon moved into the second-floor unit upstairs, and everyone breathed easier for a time. Fall arrived, and the Hinkstons settled into the neighborhood but always considered their stay temporary, even as the months rolled by, one after the other. It wasn’t like on Thirty-Second, where Doreen had made it a point to get to know her neighbors and watch over the neighborhood boys. At the time of Patrice’s eviction, six months after the family had relocated to Eighteenth and Wright, the only neighbor Doreen knew by name was Lamar—and his name was all she really knew about him. “I don’t even go to anybody’s houses, like I used to,” Doreen said about her new neighborhood. “I used to get up and go to visitors. Now I just…stand around.” When winter set in, weeks would pass without Doreen so much as stepping outside.

“The public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.” So wrote Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs believed that a prerequisite for this type of healthy and engaged community was the presence of people who simply were present, who looked after the neighborhood. She has been proved right: disadvantaged neighborhoods with higher levels of “collective efficacy”—the stuff of loosely linked